’Tis the Season for Red, Green…and Blue

Maybe it’s the contrarian in me, but seasons of forced jollity tend to evoke the opposite emotions of sadness and loss. I know I’m not alone. Blue Christmas is a universal phenomenon.

My partner and I were reminded by the season that for the past four years we have lost family members during the holidays: a brother each, a mother, and an ex-brother-in-law. More than a decade ago my father died on Christmas Eve. Loss, though purely coincidental with the festive season, is nonetheless more keenly felt when all about you is supposed to be joyful.

Music is the emotional marker, and everyone has a selection of popular sad-song favorites this time of year. I’ll limit myself to three.

The oldest is “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” first recorded by Bing Crosby in 1943. The lyric represents a letter home, written by a serviceman posted overseas during World War II. “I’ll be home for Christmas,” the lyric goes, “if only in my dreams.” Bing’s rendition was a top-ten hit, and the song seems to have been recorded by a new artist or two every year. It probably resonates with me because my father was a serviceman, posted overseas during World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. Most military families have endured missed Christmases. And because this country is perpetually at war, it seems, there's no end in sight.

“Blue Christmas,” written by Billy Hayes and Jay W. Johnson, was initially recorded by Doyle O’Dell in 1948 but more memorably by Ernest Tubb a little later. Tubb’s rendition occupied the #1 spot on Billboard magazine’s Most-Played Juke Box (Country and Western) Records for the first week of January in 1950. However, the most popular version came nearly a decade and a half later, when Elvis Presley recorded it for the album, Blue Christmas, which was released in November 1964. The album was among a cluster of “comeback” recordings during the years following Elvis’s stint in the military from March 24, 1958, to March 2, 1960, when he was discharged with the rank of sergeant.

Interestingly, Presley was stationed in Friedburg, Germany, beginning October 1 of 1958. Our family was posted to Butzbach, Germany, that year; I was ten years old when Mom, my brother, my sister, and I arrived to join Dad in what was then West Germany on December 14. While Elvis was in Germany, he met fourteen-year-old Priscilla Beaulieu, whom he would marry after a seven-and-a-half-year courtship.

The last of my three is “Hard Candy Christmas,” written by Carol Hall for the musical The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. Who’d have thought that a song sung by the evicted prostitutes of a Texas brothel would become a sad Christmas standard? In the movie version Dolly Parton played the madame and released her version of the song in October 1982. It climbed to #8 on the U.S. country singles chart. The film adaptation also featured some songs added by Dolly, including “I Will Always Love You,” which later became a hit for Whitney Houston, although I’ve always favored Dolly’s rendition.

Others can add their sad favorites for this season, and I could mention a few more. But three are sufficient.

Blue Moon: Blue, Blue, Blue

When two full moons occur within the same month, the second is called a “blue moon.” The infrequency of the occurrence has made it a subject of folklore as well as scientific investigation. A common expression is “once in a blue moon,” that is, rarely.

Most years twelve full moons occur, approximately once monthly, over the course of the year. But the common calendar (called the Gregorian calendar) is not precisely aligned to the lunar cycle. Thus every two or three years there is an “extra” full moon.

Various explanations are given for this full moon’s designation as “blue.” One is that in Old English belewe can mean either “blue” or “betrayer.” Because early clergy were responsible for calculating the date of Easter based on the full moon, some years they may have needed to explain whether a particular full moon was actually the “Lent moon” or a false one, a “betrayer moon.”

Are blue moons actually blue? Rarely. But certain moons, not necessarily full moons, in past ages did seem to be bluish in color. The perceived color change probably was the result of other substances in the atmosphere, such as dust or ash from volcanic eruptions. One story is that in December 1883 geologist W. Jerome Harrison reported viewing an “electric-blue” crescent moon against a copper-colored sky from his home in Birmingham, England. He attributed it to lingering atmospheric debris from the explosion of Krakatoa, a volcano in Indonesia. Krakatoa’s spectacular eruptions began in May 1883, culminating in the destruction of the volcano island in August that year. In addition to the volcanic explosions, subsequent tsunamis devastated the region.

Blue moons also have been the subject of popular songs, often with blue given the connation of sadness, sometimes mixed with the sense of rarity. The most popular example is Rogers and Hart’s “Blue Moon,” which begins: “Blue Moon, you saw me standing alone, / Without a dream in my heart, / Without a love of my own.” But then a new love comes along, and the song includes the line, “And when I looked the Moon had turned to gold.” When the tune was first composed by Richard Rogers, it was given different lyrics and originally intended to be sung by Jean Harlow in the 1933 MGM film, Hollywood Party, which featured a number of the movie stars of the era. The song went through other versions — for example, repurposed for the film, Manhattan Melodrama in 1934 — until Lorenz Hart finally gave it the familiar lyrics after that film was released. Since 1934 “Blue Moon” has become a standard ballad, recorded by popular singers including Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, and Elvis Presley.

There also is the bluegrass song, “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” written by Bill Monroe in 1947, in which the blue moon is told to “Shine on the one that’s gone and left me blue.” Monroe, often called the “Father of Bluegrass,” is credited with popularizing the genre, which takes its name from his band, the Blue Grass Boys. Monroe’s home state of Kentucky has the nickname, the “Bluegrass State,” based on the prevalence of bluegrass, a smooth meadow grass of the Poa genus. Bluegrass seedpods turn from green to a purple-blue hue, which gives this grass its name.

A blue moon rising on New Year’s Eve welcomed in 2010. The next blue moon should occur in 2011 — plenty of time for any aspiring folklorists or songwriters to get a new composition ready.